Organization of math workshop

Organize Math Workshop!

Math is my favorite! I think it's because our district realized a few years ago that our curriculum was not effective, and we've needed to make up our own lessons--which is one of my favorite things! Next year we'll be using Go Math, and I'm very nervous. On the bright side, we're getting lots of technology to use with it, so that's very exciting.

Our math block is broken into 5 key components. We have daily math review, mental math, fact fluency, whole group lesson, and small group lessons/math centers.

To keep me organized for daily math review, mental math, fact fluency, and my whole group lessons, I have math baskets. These are baskets with 3 compartments. There's one basket for each table. In the basket, I have counters, challenge task cards, flashcards, and two dominos.  

The flashcards and math task challenge cards (one of my most popular products) are to keep students engaged if they finish a little early. I use the dominoes to make partner talk smoother. The domino goes between the partners, and before partner talk, we spin a more/less spinner. This determines which partner gets to talk first.

My whole group math lesson is usually centered around problem solving. This is a real passion of mine. I wrote about it a few months ago; go read the post to find some freebies! I also have a 20 problem set of challenging problems in my store.

During small group math I have my students go to BUILD IT centers. You are probably familiar with BUILD, but if not, you can learn about it at Adventures in Teaching. I don't really implement it correctly, but I just like calling it BUILD IT because it helps separate math and reading. I added the IT (Internet/Technology).  I needed smaller groups to have a computer for each group member. I have 6 tables, so it made sense to have 6 stations. If the students are at Internet/technology, I let them use the 'math websites' section of my class website. I have a crazy number of math activities that I rotate through my BUILD IT baskets. You can follow my math board on Pinterest if you are looking for some good activities. I also have some missing part dominoes in my TPT store.

Center storage: functional, Not very fancy! When activities
are in circulation, I keep them in baskets labeled with letters B-U-I-L-D

Thanks for stopping by!! If you missed it, I posted some math freebies a couple weeks ago. Be sure to follow me on FB for fan freebies as well!

Hop back to the linky to read more about how teachers organize math workshop!

CGI Problem solving as a vehicle

First grade math curriculum and standards have changed so much since I began teaching! The CCSS require first graders to:

Use place value understanding and properties of operations to add and subtract.
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.NBT.C.4Add within 100, including adding a two-digit number and a one-digit number, and adding a two-digit number and a multiple of 10, using concrete models or drawings and strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction; relate the strategy to a written method and explain the reasoning used. Understand that in adding two-digit numbers, one adds tens and tens, ones and ones; and sometimes it is necessary to compose a ten.

I like to use problem solving as a vehicle to help students grasp this concept. The way this works is by carefully selecting the numbers you use in your problem-solving tasks.  Rather than introducing a strategy and giving students a problem to solve using the strategy, I give students a problem and help them discover more efficient strategies.

My average students are very efficient with counting up from a number and using a hundreds chart. They are also getting proficient with adding multiples of 10 to a given number. Now I'm going to introduce them to adding two digit numbers that are not multiples of 10. My first problems are:

When I introduce a problem, I read it several times. We talk about what is happening in the problem. These problems are very straight forward because I want to focus on the complex number work. Then I might ask the students what they notice about the number selections. When someone notices that all the numbers end in 3 or 1, I will be very surprised and make some sort of comment about how I can't believe I did that. The students work on these problems individually. I have them divide their notebook page into 4 sections and solve the problem using all 4 of the number selections.

I just spent a couple weeks working on join-change-unknown (unknown addend) and compare problems. You can read a little about it and get an old freebie here. The problems I will be using the next couple weeks are almost all basic addition or part-part-whole. To start out I made the numbers pretty high because I want to discourage drawing pictures. If   When I see someone drawing bunches of circles, I will remind them how much faster it is to draw large numbers using base 10 pictures. As students work I circulate and look for interesting strategies, I try to talk to as many students as possible. I choose 1-4 students to share their math. After 10-15 minutes of work time, everyone cleans up except the kids who were asked to share.

I have the student with the most basic strategy share first, and the most complex strategy solve last. When I present these problems the first few times, I expect a large number of students will count on by ones, hopefully they will start with the bigger number! If I can find anyone who starts with the bigger number and counts on by 10s, then adds the ones, I will ask that person to share. The goal is to find a student who breaks the problem apart into 10s and 1s to solve. I know some of my students will, but they probably won't demonstrate that in their work, I'll need to pull it out of them. I show them how to record their thinking in a way that is efficient, but still shows me what they did. Some students will just write an equation because they added 10s and 1s mentally. Once the students have shared, I will write the 4 equations and give them another chance to tell what they notice. Before I introduce the next problem, I often refer back to the strategies used in the previous problem and encourage students to try "Danny's strategy" of adding tens and ones.

The first few days of this series of problems have number selections where the numbers in the ones place stays the same in each selection. Then I start using more number variety. Once students are pretty comfortable with adding tens and ones separately, I have a few problems where the numbers in the ones place make 10.Finally, I give the students some problems where the numbers in ones place add up to 12. When I got to this point, I went back to keeping the number in the ones place the same.

I am sharing this sample from my series with everyone. If you are interested in the whole 12 problem set, please like my Not very fancy Facebook page.

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I would love to hear about how problem solving looks in your class! 

Lots of good stuff!

So many amazing things happen in the second half of first grade! I'm excited to be able to link up with Curious Firsties for Wednesday WOW for the first time! It's a long post, but there is a freebie at the end. :)

Last week I wrote about how much we were enjoying Tacky the Penguin. 

 I just wanted to share some of the writing we did. We made lists of words describing Tacky and words describing his companions. I asked the students to think about whether they were more like Tacky or his companions then they used our word list compare themselves to the characters. Some of them are just hilarious!

I really think that the compare/contrast component of the assignment got them to describe themselves much more than just asking them to describe themselves. By the way, the fun paper is an old freebie from Primary Graffiti.

The other thing I'm super excited about is my math test results!  The most challenging skill this trimester was the problem solving. Students had to solve some challenging problem types and correctly write an equation. Ninety-five percent of the class was able to correctly solve a compare problem. That's up from about 10% on the pretest. I like to use Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) whenever I can. My class really needed to work on 'join-change-unknown' and 'compare-difference-unknown.' I wrote a bunch of problems focusing on these two problem types, and almost all my kids were able to correctly solve both these problem types. Most of them could write the equations as well (which is really difficult with the compare problems.) If you are trying to get your class to learn these skills, check out my JCU and CDU Problems. Things started out a bit rocky, but after about 2 weeks, they really got it!

One more little WOW--I wore a fleece today during recess duty (and probably didn't even need that), and tomorrow school could be closed because of a blizzard. 

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